Miami Twice Part Two: The Second Half - Only Fools & Horses Podcast

So I saved this part for part two since it's quite a chunk of information, but we don't have to do the trivia at the beginning of this episode, so I thought I would just add this in here.

So I mentioned in the original trivia in part one that there were some large production issues with this episode before, and these were mainly due to some large disputes with the Teamsters Union.

So I just have a little bit here to read.

So Gareth Gwenlyn, in the official Inside Story book by Steve Clarke, described this whole affair as an absolute nightmare.

He said that he'd known that it would be no picnic, but hadn't expected it to be this bad.

He and Tony Dow had already flown out to Miami and met with the Florida Film Board, who had assured them that they would have no issues with unions and that they could bring their own department heads and hire local Miami technicians to work on the shoot.

And that is what they did, because they didn't want to bring absolutely everybody over from the UK.

That would have been super expensive and unnecessary.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

So the issues first became apparent when they attempted to hire vehicles for the shoot.

And this is where they encountered the Teamsters Drivers Union founded in 1903.

And it is still around today.

Now, you don't want to mess with unions in the US because there's definitely big problems, as we'll see here.

Whoa.

Whoa.

what the

hell so here's a direct quote from the book because it's easier to just do it this way gwenlyn said it was a somber dark wood paneled office with heavy leather furniture where i found this great fat balding guy sitting at his desk he had a real james cagney at his worst accent and said i'm not going to try and do an accent he said what are you doing in my town So I explained how much money we were spending in the city and that we were employing some 60 local technicians.

And he said, yeah, but you ain't employing any of my members.

I said that we weren't because we had our own driver vehicles and we were told that that was fine.

He said, well, I'm here to tell you that it ain't fine and I want 12 of my drivers on that set tomorrow.

Otherwise, I will shut you down.

It sounded like something out of a film, right? But it's absolutely true.

I thought, do I laugh or do I take this seriously? I was worried because we'd spent and committed a lot of our budget to this.

And if everything went wrong, then it would all go down the drain.